Facebook has become such a pervasive force in modern society that increasing numbers of employers, and even some psychologists, believe people who aren't on social networking sites are 'suspicious.'The German magazine Der Taggspiegel went so far as to point out that accused theater shooter James Holmes and Norwegian mass murder Anders Behring Breivik have common ground in their lack of Facebook profiles. On a more tangible level, Forbes.com reports that human resources departments across the country are becoming more wary of young job candidates who don't use the site.

The Internet Archive has partnered with BitTorrent to publish over 1,000,000 of its books, music and movies as legal torrents. It's a huge whack of legal content in the torrentverse, and a major blow to the schemes of entertainment execs to have the whole BitTorrent protocol filtered away to nothing on sight.

This is one of the times I'm lucky to be middle aged. "Facebook? No, I don't have a page, don't spend much time online".

This is the start of a scary Orwellesque social trend, though; suspicion toward anyone who's not inclined to hang their whole life out in public via social media. I expect we'll see an increase in the number of people who maintain multiple profiles to keep their personal and professional networks separate from one another.

How long have Facebook insisted on wannabe converts handing over a phone number to authenticate their identity?

A couple of months back, I tried helping a very net-unsavvy relative sign-up but they suddenly went off the idea when this mandatory demand appeared. Which, to be honest, is completely understandable, alongside all those well-publicised privacy concerns, unpredictable censorship policy, arbitrary email address changes, etc, etc and etc. (Is FB really as bad as every report I've read about it makes out? A near-billion users would seem to suggest otherwise but...)

When i was in my final year of university, we were encouraged to have two facebook accounts social and professional, needless to say the professional ones are all dormant two years later, and i only ever had the one.